Re: Few Questions About Debian

[Dave Sherohman <dave@sherohman.org>]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2008 at 04:55:25PM +0100, ???????????????????? ??. ???????????????? wrote:
> Quoth Depo Catcher:
> > Say I want 
> > to apply all the security patches [or to get all updates] for my version, 
> > is there an easy way to do that?
> 
> Debian stable is already very secure, the maintainers do a good job in keeping
> stuff clean and stable. But you can always download the deb-src package (be sure
> to include the src-repos for that, too) and compile that stuff yourself, possibly
> applying patches along the way

While you could rebuild from source for security patches from upstream,
you'd be departing (IMO rather seriously) from Debian stable at that
point, as the upstream patches will tend to be against the latest
version of the program, while Debian stable does not introduce new
versions.  Following the bleeding edge tends to be somewhat antithetical
to stability, after all.

Instead, the Debian security team backports the security patches to the
stable version and makes the resulting updated package available via
apt, you just need to add a security repository to /etc/apt/sources.list
(e.g:
deb http://security.debian.org stable/updates main contrib non-free
) and then the standard `aptitude update && aptitude upgrade` will fetch
and install any outstanding security updates.  (apt-get and aptitude are
more-or-less synonymous, but aptitude is the official replacement for
apt-get and seems to do a little better with handling package
conflicts.)  You may also want to subscribe to the debian-security
mailing list to receive notices whenever the security team releases an
updated package.

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